Dom's Base

Wow, what an exciting time for real-time 3D enthusiasts!

Epic released the UDK for PC: the Unreal Development Kit based on the famous Unreal 3 Engine! For non-commercial/Edu use it's totally free. And for commercial use there is a very reasonable and transparent pricing:

• Internal Use: 2.500 US $ per developer seat per year
• Publishing: 25% royalties for revenues above 5000 US $
• Internal Use may stack with publishing thus: per seat per year plus royalties

You can read it directly on their site. Checkout the features, here some highlights:

• SpeedTree included – with editor
• global illumination solver
• Bink Video Codec
• Animation is driven by an AnimTree
• animated Facial normal maps using a visual scripting system
• slicing of objects for physics-based destructions
• distributed assets processing
• automated creation of navigation meshes for pathfinding
• visual shader creation system
• and much more of the "usual" Unreal Engine stuff 😉

Another YAY 😀

One important note though: this is basically the modding access. No source code access. So this may mean that if you can't script what you need, you won't be able to implement it.